hankyoreh

On Nov. 15, prosecutors indicted two former Blue House officials from the Roh Moo-hyun administration’s unification, foreign affairs, and national security team - office chief Baek Jong-chun and secretary Cho Myung-kyun - for the “grievous crime” of allegedly violating the Presidential Records Act by destroying transcripts from the 2007 inter-Korean summit between Roh and then North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. But the announcement reads as though the real culprit was Roh himself. The late former president is painted as orchestrating a deliberate cover-up and destruction - an allegation that ignores his generosity in leaving transcripts, and even recordings, with the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to make them easier for future presidents to access. Simply put, this finding is breathtaking in its wrongheadedness.

Ahead of last December’s presidential election, members of Saenuri Party (NFP) candidate Park Geun-hye’s camp repeatedly broke the seal on important classified transcripts and used them in an attempt to influence the election. Saenuri lawmakers like Chung Moon-hun and Kim Moo-sung painted Roh red by accusing him of “abandoning” the Northern Limit Line (NLL) with North Korea in the West (Yellow) Sea at the summit. Once the actual transcripts were released, they turned out to include a bit of coarse language, but nothing whatsoever about abandoning the NLL. Roh-era defense minister Kim Jang-soo even testified before the National Assembly that Roh had explicitly ordered observance of the NLL. These are the plain facts.

If Roh’s own transcript statements are the stuff of political attacks, then from the prosecutors’ standpoint, it is a clear violation of the law to leak them and use them as part of an election campaign. Common sense dictates that any investigation should be focusing on the leak part. Somehow, these prosecutors have gotten the whole thing mixed up, and are responding instead to the Saenuri Party and conservative media’s claims about document destruction.

At the moment, they are acting as though editing a transcript draft is some heinous crime. The edits in question were things like changing “solution” to “cure” in line with the actual content of the recording, or amending the leaders’ titles. And Roh’s advisers are probably right that the failure to send copies to the National Archives was a working-level oversight, not a deliberate destruction. This explanation is supported by Roh’s having left the transcripts with the NIS for ease of reading, noting in the transcript that they should be shared “by the prime ministers and unification ministers responsible for talks in the future.” In ignoring this and acting as though the drafts were destroyed to cover something up, the prosecutors are simply twisting the facts.

Those prosecutors have also shown their blatant political bias. On Oct. 2, they stirred things up with an out-of-nowhere interim announcement about “meaningful differences” between the draft and final versions. During their investigation, they publicly summoned Democratic Party lawmaker Moon Jae-in as a witness, while requiring only a written response to questions from Kim Moo-sung, who is a suspect. There are serious doubts about whether they really plan to investigate the “operation” by the Saenuri Party and NIS to use the transcripts to influence last December’s election. And the decision to indict Baek, someone who was merely carrying out a president’s orders, seems grossly unfair when you consider that no charges were ever pressed against the officials involved in the NIS online opinion campaign.

With the targeted campaigns against Chae Dong-wook and Yun Seok-yeol and what amounted to an “investigation for hire” against the Korean Government Employees’ Union, things are at the point now where the prosecutors are being accused of more than just political bias, but actually acting as the administration’s attack dogs. Many are saying that while the politicized prosecutors of the Lee Myung-bak administration are the ones who drove Roh to his eventual suicide, then the ones under the Park administration are now trying to dig up his corpse for further abuse. We hope they realize just how bad this looks.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]